41.72 Unstable - Project Zomboid (2024)

Today we are releasing version 41.72 to the Unstable beta.

If you need directions to this, then here’s a handy gif!

As always with the Unstable beta – be aware that some mods might break.

We don’t anticipate a huge amount of disruption with 41.72, but should any of your workshop mods become non-operational then please inform the relevant creators – and be patient while they find the time to update their wares. They have jobs / families / lives too!

So what’s in 41.72? Well the changelist can be found here on our forums, and there’s a lot of small tweaks and fixes to scroll through, but we’ll detail the main stuff here also.

It’s always HUGELY helpful for us when people, and server owners, jump over to the unstable beta – so please dive in and let us know how you find it.

41.72

• Lots of general stability and security work has gone into MP – and specifically work on vehicles when you are driving alongside (or are a passenger sitting next to) players with far higher or lower pings than your good self.
• The first of several layers of polish to the game’s food and recipes. New foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes and all manner of different things to put together to feed yourself and your doomed friends. Various elements of balance too and, as mentioned before, no more footballs that can be jammed into a toaster.
• Fellow co-op, faction and safehouse member positions can now be seen on your in-game map should you choose to enable it.

• An improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. A list of mods has been added to the pause menu, and whenever one is erroring out then it’ll be flagged within the list. This is going in alongside an improved lua error log that shows whether any files reported in call stacks are being overridden by mods. This should help modders and our support teams no end.
• The game’s foraging system will now understand polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than rely on its former basic rectangular brain. This should help with decreasing the amount of non-forageable spaces on the map.
• A slight tweak to zed pathfinding, which means zombies targeting players have a higher priority in the game code than those shambling around more aimlessly.
• The final large map export that we’ll be doing before Build 42, most likely. This is primarily to fix user reported map bugs, but also contains improved farmsteads, scarecrows (that might be bugged and appear as mannequins currently – sorry) and improved Louisville upper class districts.

• Alongside the above there are various new tiles going into the game: including baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, ATM machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and car wash tiles.

• For MP: new admin powers and tools – for example a brush tool that will allow server chiefs to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game. Also: a thunder trigger, better synced health panels, improved vehicle/trailer spawning, player weight changing and heightened control over zombie movement, zed spawning and locked doors.

• New loot maps for Louisville – which previously didn’t have any. There are nine different maps in all, due to the size of LV, which all unlock the area they show in your in-game map – alongside a wide range of different survivor ‘treasure map’ annotations.
• A smidgen of improvement to corpses. More of these will now be ‘fake dead’ zombies, alongside improvement to their rotting – such as the chance of spawning maggots in their inventory and on the floor around them. Handy for fishing!
• Polish to player emotes and idles. Better representation of weapon-part upgrades. Generator/battery improvements. New action music track. Fixed blood appearing on destroyed objects, and about a million other fixes – best to check the changelist!

JOBZ

While we have your attention: another quick flag to the fact that we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard.

This will most likely be someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs.

If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!

This week’s exciting and no doubt doom-laden story-via-map from Athiuk! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta begancan be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct yourattention to thePZ Wikishould you feel like editing or amending something, and thePZ Mailing Listthat can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitterright here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.

Oh, and Spanish-speaking community! Be aware of a biiiig PZ streaming event on Twitch starting this Sunday, hosted by @EscocesSL. Spiffo hopes everyone has fun!